Abstracts 31 August - Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Transcrição

Abstracts
War of Ideas in Iraq War: A contextual analysis of the Role of
Presupposition in Blair’s Televised Political Dialogue
Mohamed Abidi (ISLT, Tunisia)
[email protected]
Mediatized political dialogue has the potential to play a key role in the
manipulation of audience members, be they political party affiliates or overhearers. This article examines the use of presupposition as a semantic device in
Tony Blair’s televised political discourse during the outbreak of the Second Gulf
War on Iraq. More specifically, drawing upon van Dijk’s socio-cognitive
paradigm of critical discourse analysis (CDA), this study goes beyond the
identification of the linguistic realizations of presupposition to proclaim its
underlying cognitive processes as well as its latent political and ideological
purposes. Upon a closer scrutiny, the findings of this study reveal that the exBritish Prime Minister, based on his epistemic knowledge device (K-device),
endeavored to use two categories of presupposition, namely, pragmatic and
informative presuppositions in view of (i) constraining discourse reception and
interpretation by the targeted audience and (ii) achieving political and
ideological ends. Taking the results as a starting point, suggestions will be made
to impart the analysis of mediatized political dialogue.
Keywords: Iraq war, political dialogue, Tony Blair, presupposition, K-device,
ideology
References
Greco, S. (2003). When Presupposing Becomes Dangerous: How the Procedure
of Presuppositional Acommodation Can Be Exploited in Manipulative
Discourses. Studies in Communication Sciences, 3, 217–234.
Mazid, B. M. (2007). Presuppositions and Strategic Functions in Bush’s Speech:
A Critical Discourse Analysis. Journal of Language and Politics, 6, 351–
75.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and Manipulation. Discourse & Society, 17,
359-383.
‘Motions of support’ as feedback to political action
Eric A. Anchimbe (University of Bayreuth, Germany)
[email protected]
On the political scene in Cameroon, there is what has generally been referred to
as “motions of support”. These are open letters addressed especially to the
president of the country by social, political, regional and ethnic groups as a sign
of their appreciation for the appointment of one of theirs into government or a
pledge of their continual support for the government or president. These letters
are generally read on radio or television and/or are published in newspapers. The
timing of these letters shows that they function as feedback or response to
political action, especially those decisions of the government that the group
considers positive to them.
This paper studies the structure of motions of support addressed to the
Cameroonian president by two types of groups: political groups and ethnic or
regional groups. The aim is to come up with a taxonomy of motions of support
and how they perform their role as feedback – performed in the public space
rather than in the private – to politicians and their political actions. Politicians
use these motions as justification for previous action and as motivation for
future decisions – often decisions that go against the constitution, but which,
they claim, are sanctioned by the will of the people.
The data used here consist of motions of support to President Paul Biya
since 1995. Most of these are published in a two-volume collection published
recently under the title Paul Biya: The People's Call (SOPECAM). The book
has been described by the current Prime Minister as “a testimony of
communication between a people and their leader…[and] as a healthy two-way
flow of messages”.
Confrontational strategic manoeuvres in a political interview
Corina Andone (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
[email protected]
The aim of this paper is to show how a pragma-dialectical analysis of
confrontational argumentative moves can benefit from insight into the
characteristics of a political interview where such moves are performed. In line
with the pragma-dialectical perspective, confrontational argumentative moves
are seen as strategic manoeuvers that arguers perform in an attempt to remain
reasonable while also trying to be effective.
In order to demonstrate how knowledge of the rules that operate in a
political interview plays a vital role in the analysis of confrontational strategic
manoeuvring, Andone pursues as follows. She characterizes the argumentative
exchanges that operate in a political interview in correspondence to the four
stages of a critical discussion. In addition, she specifies a number of contextual
pre-conditions that constrain the realization of confrontational strategic
manoeuvres. Finally, she analyzes an argumentative exchange from a political
interview in which an interviewer accuses a politician of an inconsistency.
Keywords: strategic manoeuvring, political interview, inconsistency, retraction,
activity type
Constructing Political Dialogue through Allusions – An Intertextual
Analysis of Bill Clinton's Second Inaugural Address
Frank Austermuehl (The University of Auckland, New Zealand)
[email protected]
This paper analyzes the use of intertextual references in U.S. presidential
discourse. Based on a typological introduction to intertextuality and allusions,
and taking into consideration Bakhtin'
s notion of dialogicity as an open
confrontation of diverging points of views, I will be discussing how U.S.
president Bill Clinton, in his second inaugural address, employed allusions to
create a political dialog with, amongst others, Martin Luther King, Abraham
Lincoln, the Founding Fathers, FDR, and Ronald Reagan to address the
politically sensitive notion of racial inequality. In particular, I will focus on both
the critical and dramatic potential that such a virtual dialog offers in political
discourse in general.
Criticism, especially the public identification of the nation'
s shortcomings,
is in general not part of the repertoire of American presidents'inaugural
addresses. Such a critical approach would undermine the genre'
s primary
discursive function of creating national unity through a public celebration of the
national'
s tradition values. An open, critical reflection of the policies of
presidential predecessors would also contradict the image of continuity that
presidential inaugurations aim to project. Criticism directed at the American
system is therefore often implemented indirectly through the use allusions, i.e.
intertextual references to other persons, places, or texts.
Keywords: American presidential discourse; intertextuality; allusions; Clinton,
Bill; inaugural address.
References
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. Presidents Creating the
Presidency: Deeds Done in Words. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2008.
Denton, Robert E. and Rachel L. Holloway (ed.). The Clinton Presidency:
Images, Issues, and Communication Strategies. Westport, Conn.: Praeger,
1996.
Hebel, Udo J.. "Towards a Descriptive Poetics of Allusion." Heinrich E. Plett
(ed.). Intertextuality. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991. 135-164.
Third Order Positioning in Political Interviews
Annette Becker (Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany)
[email protected]
Within political interviews, positioning and especially third order positioning is
an essential strategy for the public negotiation of identities and roles (Harré and
Moghaddam 2003, Weizman 2008). This paper focuses on the strategic
functions of third order positioning in political interviews, drawing on data from
international political discourse, such as U.S.-President Barack Obama'
s first
interview with the BBC, and highlighting the functions of third order positioning
for practices of contextualization. Special attention is paid to the relationship
between third-order positioning and political face (Bull, Elliott, Palmer and
Walker 1996), as well as the relationship between third-order positioning and
heteroglossic engagement (Martin and White 2005), bearing in mind the
dynamic relationship between these concepts and their contexts in political
dialogue.
Keywords: political interviews, third order positioning, face, identity, appraisal
References
Bull, P., Elliott, J., Palmer, D., and Walker, L. 1996. "Why politicians are threefaced: The face model of political interviews". British Journal of Social
Psychology 35: 267–284.
Harré, R. and Moghaddam, F.M. (eds). 2003. The Self and Others: Positioning
Individuals and Groups in Personal, Political, and Cultural Contexts.
Westport, CT: Praeger.
Martin, J.R. and White, P.R.R. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in
English. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Weizman, E. 2008. Positioning in Media Dialogue: Negotiating Roles in the
News Interview. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
The Making of a New American Revolution or a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing:
“It’s a Time to Reload”
Lawrence N. Berlin (Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, USA)
[email protected]
The Tea Party Movement has US political pundits scrambling to understand
who its members are—their political affiliations and the resulting affects on
established political parties. Deriving its name from an event precipitating the
American Revolution, it is emerging as a political force in the elections of 2010
and beyond. Enter Sarah Palin—ex-governor of Alaska, ex-Republican VicePresidential candidate, and National Rifle Association member.
As “conversations have storylines and the positions people take in a
conversation will be linked to these storylines” (van Langenhove & Harré,
1999, p. 17), Palin’s polarizing talk creates a populist storyline wherein she
establishes and strengthens herself by positioning others outside the discourse.
Referring to contentious political issues—those sure to incite the very
discontent that led citizens to join the movement—her third order positioning
reflects a form of contextualization where the talk reinforces a perceived reality
(Berlin, 2007).
Using critical discourse analysis to examine her speeches to Tea Party
assemblies, signifiers are identified to indicate the appeal Palin has for Tea
Party adherents. Simultaneously, the lack of substance and direction in her
political discourse is unveiled through use of various forms of redundancy
(Orwell, 1946) and violations of the Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1967).
Keywords: third order positioning, political discourse, contextualization,
storyline, critical discourse analysis
References
Berlin, L. N. (2007). Cooperative conflict and evasive language: The case of the
9-11 Commission hearings. In A. Fetzer (Ed.), Context and
appropriateness:
Micro
meets
macro
(pp.
167-199).
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan (Eds.),
Syntax and semantics (Vol. 3, Speech Acts) (pp. 41-58). New York:
Academic Press.
Orwell, G. (1946). Politics and the English language. London: Horizon.
Van Langenhove, L., & Harré, R. (1999). Positioning theory. Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Post-apartheid constructions of identity among South African university
students
Zannie Bock (University of the Western Cape, South Africa)
Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen (University of Ghent, Belgium)
[email protected]
[email protected]
This paper explores how a group of undergraduate students at the University of
the Western Cape, South Africa, remember ‘Apartheid’ and position themselves
in relation to this past. In particular, it aims to trace the ways in which different
participants draw on different discourses to refer to the past and to evaluate its
impact on themselves and the present. It is interested in how young people
construct their identities within a rapidly changing social context and how this
relates to the intergenerational transmission of social trauma and knowledge
(Volkan 2009, Jansen 2009).
The data for this paper include interviews with a single black participant,
as well as a mixed group of students (black, white and coloured). The analysis
traces the different, often competing, discourses which shape their positions,
attitudes and values which they encode. To support this analysis, the paper uses
the Appraisal framework of Martin and White (2003) to track the competing
attitudes and stances that weave through the data.
Keywords: post-apartheid identities, social trauma, racial relations, competing
discourses, Appraisal
References:
Jansen, J. 2009. Knowledge in the blood: Confronting race and apartheid past.
Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press.
Martin, J. and White, P. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in
English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Volkan, V. 2009. The next chapter: Consequences of social trauma. In P.
Gobodo-Madikizela and C. van der Merwe (eds.) Memory, Narrative and
Forgiveness: Perspectives on the Unfinished Journeys of the Past.
Newcastle on Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Pages 1-26.
The Microanalysis of Political Discourse
Peter Bull (University of York, UK)
[email protected]
Microanalysis represents both a distinctive methodology and a distinctive way
of thinking about communication (Bull, 2003). Its application to the analysis of
political discourse is discussed in relation to the concepts of face and facework
(Bull & Fetzer, in press), the social skills model of social interaction, and the
role of social context. Social context is considered in terms of four distinctive
genres of communication: broadcast interviews, parliamentary question time;
prime ministerial debates and political speeches. Illustrative examples are
drawn from the analysis of equivocation (Bull, 2008) and applause invitations in
political speeches (Bull, 2006). Particular attention is given to the practical
significance of microanalytic research, with reference not only to politicians and
media professionals, but also to the wider electorate as a whole. It is argued
that microanalysis provides powerful techniques for analysing political
discourse, thereby deepening our understanding of the political process as a
whole.
Keywords: microanalysis; social skills; face and facework; communication
genres; equivocation
References
Bull, P. (2003). The Microanalysis of Political Communication: Claptrap and
Ambiguity. London: Routledge.
Bull, P. (2006). Invited and uninvited applause in political speeches. British
Journal of Social Psychology 45(3), 563-578.
Bull, P. (2008). “Slipperiness, evasion and ambiguity”: equivocation and
facework in non-committal political discourse. Journal of Language and
Social Psychology, 27(4), 324-332.
Bull, P. & Fetzer, A. (in press). Face, facework and political discourse.
International Review of Social Psychology.
Obama’s speeches and the Media
Ana Maria Burdach (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago)
Ana María Harvey (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago)
[email protected]
This paper examines the attitude and engagement in Barack Obama’s
speeches with reference to his political project as the President of the
United States of America and certain discrepancies between his stance and
that afforded by the media. The study of his attitude and engagement
towards Americans considers a critical discourse analysis perspective
(Fairclough, 2003) as well as aspects of appraisal theory as found in Martin
and Rose (2003, 2005). In spite of Obama’s popularity among American
people, the results reveal a certain dialogic discrepancy between the
attitude and commitment found in his speeches and those of the press,
particularly after assuming the presidency of the United States in 2009. The
results are illustrated and commented upon.
Keywords: political speech, author stance, attitude, engagement, the press
Bibliography:
Fairclough, Norman (2003) Analysing Discourse. London: Routledge
Hunston, S. & Thompson, G. (eds) (2001) Evaluation in Text. Oxford:
O.U.P.
Martin, J. y Rose, D. (2003) Working with Discourse. Meaning beyond the
clause. London: Continuum
Martin, J. y Rose, D. (2003) Working with Discourse. Meaning beyond the
clause. London: Continuum
Richardson, John E. (2007) Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from
Critical Discourse Analysis. China: Palgrave MacMillan
Abgeschwächte Bedeutung der Negation und expletive Negation in
italienischen und deutschen Fragesätzen des politischen Dialogs
Sibilla Cantarini (Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy)
[email protected]
In meinem Beitrag werden unterschiedliche Okkurenzen der Negation non
bzw. nicht in Fragesätzen von italienischen und deutschen Dialogen im
politischen Bereich fokussiert, welche die Polarität der im Sprechakt
ausgedrückten Proposition nicht ändern. Auf der Basis einiger Arbeiten
über die italienische und deutsche Sprache sowie mehrerer bei Cantarini
(2003) vorgeschlagenen Tests werden verschiedene Merkmale der
Negation non bzw. nicht untersucht, indem Klassen von Fragesätzen, die in
italienischen und deutschen politischen Dialogen auftreten, miteinander
konfrontiert werden. Diese sind von Mal zu Mal unter dem Gesichtspunkt
der illokutiven Kraft einer Prüfung zu unterziehen. Abschließend wird
hervorgehoben, dass bei den untersuchten deutschen politischen Dialogen
häufig die abgeschwächte Bedeutung der Negation nicht erscheint und dass
sich keine Omission der Negation feststellen lässt, die mit dem
Italienischen konfrontiert werden kann.
Schlagworte: Politische Dialoge, Fragesätze, Negation, expletive Negation
Bibliografische Hinweise
Cantarini, S. (2003): La funzione della negazione nelle frasi interrogative
dell’italiano contemporaneo. In: Romanistik in Geschichte und
Gegenwart 6, 2, 211-223.
Kappus, M. U. (2002): Topics in German negation. Ann Arbor (UMI).
Schecker, M. (1995) (Hrsg.): Fragen und Fragesätze im Deutschen.
Tübingen (Stauffenburg Verlag).
Spoken language framing in televised political discourse:
A comparison from the 2008 elections in Italy and the United States
Alan Cienki (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Gianluca Giansante, Sapienza (Università di Roma, Italy)
[email protected]>
[email protected]
Frame analysis has played a foundational role in the study of language and
communication (e.g. Fillmore 1982). Attention is moving towards how
spoken language frames information in fundamentally different ways than
written discourse, for example: allowing speakers to frame themselves in
various contexts as virtual conversation partners. The hypothesis here is
that ‘populist’ politicians are more likely than other kinds to frame their
televised talk as a conversational encounter, given that this could facilitate
‘fictive interaction’ (Pascual 2008) with their viewing audience.
This study compares two national politicians in the U.S. and Italy
known as ‘populist’ – Sarah Palin and Silvio Berlusconi – with their
respective competitors: Joseph Biden and Walter Veltroni. The data from
2008 consist of the televised debate between Palin and Biden, and the
interviews with Berlusconi and Veltroni on the talk show “Matrix”. For
each speaker, a set of behaviors is being analyzed in quantitative and
qualitative terms, including the use of pronouns, length of intonation units,
syntax, and eye gaze direction. Subjective claims made in the media about
the presentation style of these politicians will thus be put to an empirical
test, and the potential cognitive/affective consequences of framing in terms
of linguistic ‘performance’ will be discussed.
Keywords: fictive interaction, framing, populism, spoken discourse
References
Fillmore, Charles J. 1982. Frame semantics. In Linguistic Society of Korea
(ed.), Linguistics in the morning calm, 111-37. Seoul: Hanshin.
Pascual, Esther. 2008. Fictive interaction blends in everyday language and
courtroom settings. In A. Hougaard & T. Oakley (eds.), Mental spaces
approaches to discourse and interaction, 79-107. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Face Threatening Questioning: A Comparison Among Italian TV
Channels in two Subsequent Elections
Angiola Di Conza (Second University of Naples, Italy)
Augusto Gnisci (Second University of Naples, Italy)
Arjen van Dalen (University of Southern Denmark)
[email protected]
Studying the bias affecting political interviews is fundamental because of
the influence they can exert on public opinion and electoral outcomes.
We analysed how much face-threatening the questioning style was
(forcing politicians to choose among undesirable alternatives, Bull et al.,
1996; Bull & Elliot, 1998) in two samples of TV programmes broadcast
during the 2006 and 2008 Italian General Election campaigns, to detect if
and how much the threat level depends on the Channel’s typology (public
vs. private) and on the interviewed politicians’ Parties (left- vs right-wing).
We hypothesised that some public channels are biased in favour of centreleft, some private ones in favour of centre-right, other public channels in
favour of the party presently governing, whereas small parties competing
for the elections, representing a minority with a small power, are faced in
less threatening ways.
In the five couples of broadcasts compared we found a constant bias
in the expected direction: The asked questions threatened the face of
politicians according to the financial and political group supporting the
channel broadcasting the interview.
These findings support the efficacy of the proposed tools, and have relevant
implication able to make the par condicio law more effective.
Keywords: political interview; face-threatening
comparison; Italian political elections; televised bias.
style;
broadcast
References
Bull, P., Elliott, J., Palmer, D., & Walker, L. (1996). Why politicians are
three-faced: The face model of political interviews. British Journal of
Social Psychology, 35, 267-284.
Bull, P., & Elliott, J. (1998). Level of threat: Means of assessing
interviewer toughness and neutrality. Journal of Language and Social
Psychology, 17, 220-244.
Personal Marketing and Political Rhetoric
Vladimir Dosev (University of Economics, Varna, Bulgaria)
[email protected]
Personal marketing is a scientific approach and method helping ambitious
people to become visible and significant in society. During the last decades
scientists from different fields – marketing, semiotics, linguistics – have
consolidated their efforts in studying the signs used for the establishment of
the public face of famous politicians and artists. This research studies the
use of various language signs for the establishment of the image of some
Bulgarian politicians. Object of sociolinguistic and discourse analysis are
political texts published in newspapers and on the Internet. The paper
explores the importance of metaphorical speaking in the re-creation of
various folk myths and the creation of new myths. The paper comments on
the role of the myths in the establishment of the public face of some
Bulgarian politicians.
Keywords: sociolinguistic marker, metaphor, myth, discourse, rhetoric.
References
Charteris-Black, J., Politicians and Rhetoric. Palgrave Macmilian. 2005.
Fairclough, N., Analysing Discourse. Routledge. 2003.
Leeuwen, Th. van, Introducing Social Semiotics. Routledge 2005.
Strategic maneuvering in the European Parliament
Frans H. van Eemeren (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Bart Garssen (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
[email protected]
[email protected]
A parliamentary debate is a distinct argumentative activity type. In the
pragma-dialectical approach, argumentative activity types are defined
conventionalized argumentative practices in which the possibilities for
strategic maneuvering are predetermined. Strategic maneuvering always
involves topical selection, audience adaptation, and the use of
presentational devices. The protagonist’s intention is that the acceptability
of the reasons he puts forward in his arguments is transferred to the
standpoint he is defending by means of the argument scheme he has
chosen. In this paper strategic maneuvering with argument schemes is
situated in the macro context of a debate in the European Parliament. The
choice of argument schemes and the critical questions that must be
anticipated are dependent on the specific constraints and opportunities for
strategic maneuvering in this activity type. Central questions that will be
discussed are: What are the characteristics of the activity type of a debate in
European Parliament that predetermine the possibilities for strategic
maneuvering? What kind of constraints and opportunities for strategic
maneuvering can be distinguished?
Keywords: strategic maneuvering, activity type, European Parliament,
political debate, argument scheme
Bibliographical references
Eemeren, F.H. van (2010). Strategic Maneuvering in Argumentative
Discourse
Eemeren, F.H. van & Garssen B.J. (2010, te verschijnen). In Varietate
Concordia – United in Diversity. European Parliamentary Debate as
an Argumentative Activity Type.
President Barack Obama’s Cairo Speech: Remaking America’s
Foreign Policy for a New Beginning with the Muslim World
Ibrahim El-Hussari (Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon)
[email protected]
Barack Obama, now President of the United States of America since his
inauguration on January 20, 2009, has consistently kept the eloquence of his
political speech that addresses the theme of change and the need to remake
America on domestic and international levels. Following the Istanbul Speech in
which he stresses the moderate role model Turkey plays for the countries to its
east, the Cairo Speech, another major foreign policy speech delivered from an
Arab/Muslim country, reiterates Obama’s skill at using rhetoric and discursive
structures as he pledges a new beginning and a dialogue with the Muslim World.
This paper examines the discursive structures of the Cairo Speech (April 7,
2009), not as a genre in its own right but as a pragmatic address laced with the
potential to effect a historic change: bringing America back to itself and
beautifying the arrogant image of the ugly militant empire. In this speech, the
President adjusts the whole focus of vision and re-introduces America to the
Muslim World. He recapitulates on the issue of partnership and mutual interests
in the process of combating “violent extremists”. Blowing life into the fading
image of the American Dream, the president also focuses on the need to resume
the unfinished journey started off by the Founders of the American nation. All
the other metaphors and rhetorical phrases related to “change” and a “new
beginning” with the Muslim World are embedded in a highly pragmatic political
language calling for a dialogue. This paper looks at this transformative language
by examining the degree of frequency, duration and intensity to see how
subservient they are to that key-metaphor, change. The political discourse of the
speech and the linguistic conventions used are also examined in relation to
pragmatic theory and discourse analysis.
Keywords: Obama; Cairo speech; pragmatics; foreign policy; Muslim world;
dialogue; remaking America; political discourse; change
Select Bibliography
Fairclough, N. (2000). Language and Power, 2nd ed. New York: Longman.
Halliday, M.A.K (2004). An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3rd ed.
London: Arnold.
Henry, F and C. Tator (2002). Discourse of Domination. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Locke, T. (2004). Critical Discourse Analysis. London & New York: Continuum.
Wodak, R and C. Ludwig (Eds.) (1999). Challenges in a Changing World: Issues
in Critical Discourse Aanalysis. Vienna: Passagenverlag.
Internet discussion lists: a (virtual) political arena?
Titus Ensink (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
[email protected]
The growth of the internet has given rise to a number of developments in
both private and public forms of communicative practices. Many
‘traditional’ newspapers started during the last few years an online edition
next to their paper edition. This leads to a new function: apart from
providing news and/or opinions by professional journalists and editors,
online newspapers provide user generated content, added to those
professional messages. This user generated content takes the form of
discussion lists in which opinions related to the issue of the newspaper'
s
article are put forward.
This contribution focuses on some aspects of the nondirected and
nonorganized nature of these discussion lists. In view of their content, these
discussions are political in the sense that they concern actual societal
issues: internet users may express their civil concerns, opinions and
obsessions. These discussion lists are evaluated regarding the question how
readers’ reactions may be used as a source of information about prevalent
discourses in society on a certain point in time. I will illustrate this question
on the basis of two specific cases:
1. Reactions to Geert Wilders'
s anti-Islam film Fitna (March 2008);
2. Reactions concerning the broadcast of hidden camera footage of a serial
killer in prison (April 2010).
Keywords: social media, newspaper function, internet discussion lists
Understanding Audience Affiliation in Response to Political Speeches in
Japan
Ofer Feldman (Doshisha University, Japan)
[email protected]
[email protected]
This is a pioneering study focusing on audience'
s reaction to political speeches
made by parliamentary candidates for the National Diet during election
campaign in Japan. It examines specifically 38 speeches delivered by 18
candidates for the House of Representatives (the lower house of the Diet) during
the 2009 Japanese general election (held 30 August) and the related affiliated
audience responses. It details in particular such questions as (1) How does the
audience react to political speeches? (2) Is it most often a collective reaction or a
sporadic, irregular one? (3) Are there special techniques political speakers use to
elicit audience reaction to their talk, and if so, what are these techniques and
what type of reaction do these techniques generate? (4) Or, are these reactions to
political speeches are spontaneous one? This paper aims also to consider and
compare the extent to which political figures in different political cultures are
able to elicit behavior of their audience by using limited rhetorical devices.
Furthermore, this study goes beyond the existing research to examine a wide
range of affiliative audience response including collective applause, laughter,
and cheering during political speeches to detail another important aspect of
political communication in a democratic society.
Keywords: Applause; laughter; cheering; political speeches; rhetorical devices;
audience affiliation
Atkinson, J.M. (1984b). Public speaking and audience responses: some
techniques for inviting applause. In J.M. Atkinson & J.C. Heritage (Eds.),
Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis (pp.370409). Cambridge & New York: Csambridge University Press.
Bull, P. E. (2006). Invited and uninvited applause in political speeches. British
Journal of Social Psychology, 45, 563-578.
Heritage, J. & Greatbatch D. (1986). Generating applause: a study of rhetoric
and response at party political conferences. American Journal of Sociology,
92, 110-157.
"Perhaps we can come to that in a detail a little later…": The Effects of
Imprecise Language in Political Debate
Feller, Sebastian (University of Münster, Germany)
[email protected]
As presented by Schellekens, Verlegh & Smidts (2010) in a study of consumers’
word of mouth, both positive and negative product descriptions are more
effective on the receiver end if cast in imprecise language.
I will look into whether or not the same effect holds for political speech as
well. A transcript of the Iraq Inquiry will be subjected to analysis with special
emphasis on Tony Blair’s hearing in front of the Inquiry committee. Does Blair
use imprecise language to have a stronger impact on the committee members?
Weigand’s formula INTEREST F(p) will be used to shed light on how such
imprecise expressions relate to speakers’ intentions (cf., e.g., Weigand 2008)
and how Blair attempts to create credibility and sincerity (cf. Fetzer 2002)
during the hearing.
References
Fetzer, Anita (2002): ‘Put bluntly, you have something of a credibility problem’:
Sincerity and credibility in political interviews. Politics as Text and Talk,
ed. by Paul Chilton and Christina Schäffner, 173-201.
Schellekens, Gaby A..C., Verlegh, Peeter W. J. & Ale Smidts (2010): Language
Abstraction in Word of Mouth. Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 37.
Online: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/651240 (date of
access: Feb. 16, 2010)
Weigand, Edda (2008): Rhetoric in the Mixed Game. Dialogue and Rhetoric,
ed. by. Edda Weigand, 3-22. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Small Stories in Political Discourse: The Public Self goes Private
Anita Fetzer (University of Würzburg, Germany)
[email protected]
This contribution examines the form and function of small stories in
monologic and dialogic political discourse. It focuses on the interface
between private and public spheres of life, investigating the traditional
conception of politics as public-domain anchored and that of a small story
as set in the private sphere. Particular attention is given to interpersonal
aspects of communication, especially to the reconstruction of common
ground. The paper is organized as follows:
The first part examines the form of small stories from a local-context
perspective as embedded sequences taking into account setting, sequential
organization, characters and voice, and evaluation. The second part
analyses their function. It adapts a globally oriented perspective, examining
the question of what makes a stretch of discourse count as a small story.
Adapting the Gricean framework, small stories are assigned the status of a
communicative contribution, and their contextualization is accounted for
accordingly.
In political discourse, narratives and small stories allow the politician
to construct existential coherence across different genres, contexts and
spheres of life.
Keywords: narratives, private-public interface, presentation of self
References:
Duranti, A. (2006): Narrating the political self in a campaign for U.S.
Congress. Language in Society, 35: 467-497.
Fetzer, A. & Lauerbach, G. (Eds.) (2007): Political discourse in the media:
Cross-cultural perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Fetzer, A. (2010): Small stories in political discourse: the public self goes
private. In Hoffman, C. (ed.). Narratives revisited. Telling a story in
the age of new media. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Doing Competence and Responsiveness in Political Speech
Anita Fetzer (University of Würzburg, Germany)
[email protected]
[email protected]
In the Anglo-American and western European context political discourse is
not only a subset of media discourse but also counts as professional
discourse, and politicians are expected to perform accordingly. From an
ethnomethodological perspective, politicians ‘do politics’ in and through
their acts of communication, and in interactional-sociolinguistic
terminology, politicians bring their discourse identities as political agents
into a communicative setting, and they bring them out in that setting. One
of those settings is a political speech. Here, political leaders ‘talk politics’
while at the same time presenting their multiple roles and functions.
This paper examines the presentation of political self as a competent
and responsive politician in the context of 15 British party-political
speeches. Analogously to doing politics in context, competence and
responsiveness are conceptualized as brought in and brought out in the
interaction. The research design is informed by methodological
compositionality, employing the sociopragmatic tools of implicature and
inference supplemented by quantitative and qualitative corpus linguistics.
It is argued that self-references with communication verbs and
subjectification verbs generate implicatures targeting competence, while
self-references with event verbs and intention verbs target competence.
These context-dependent implicatures can be refined by local linguistic
contexts, which may override the preferred readings.
Keywords: competence, responsiveness, political speech, leadership
References
Fetzer, A. (2008): ”And I think that is a very straight forward way of
dealing with it.” The communicative function of cognitive verbs in
political discourse. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 27(4):
384-396.
Garfinkel, H. (1994): Studies in ethnomethodology. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Gumperz, J.J. (1996): The linguistic and cultural relativity of inference. In
Rethinking linguistic relativity, J.J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson (eds.),
374-406. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A Cognitive Approach to Early Conservatism
Pascal Fischer (University of Würzburg, Germany)
[email protected]
Conservatism is notoriously difficult to define. In the present talk,
conceptual metaphor theory is used to elucidate the nature of this ideology
in its early phase when it emerged in England as a force struggling with the
ideas of the French Revolution. It can be shown that conservative authors
frequently violate the pattern of orientational metaphors described by
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, according to which “up” is usually
regarded as positive and “down” as negative. Conservatives often associate
their own ideas with depth or a downward movement, whereas the loathed
ideas of the political opponents are related to height or an upward
movement. This dichotomy is closely connected to the polarity between
solidity, stability and weight on the one hand and gaseity, volatility and
lightness on the other. The study bases its analysis on numerous political
tracts, pamphlets, and novels from the 1790s and early 1800s.
Keywords: conceptual metaphor theory, orientational metaphors,
conservatism, English political writing, 1790-1805
References:
Lakoff, George; Mark Johnson (1980), Metaphors We Live by. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George (1996), Moral Politics. What Conservatives Know That
Liberals Don’t. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Imperative Newspaper Headlines in Political Discourse
Markus Freudinger (University of Würzburg)
[email protected]
This talk deals with the function of imperatives as newspaper headlines in
political discourse. Imperatives are mostly subjectless and therefore rather
short which suits the block languages of headlines. Their prototypical
function is directive, but not all imperative headlines are directives.
Therefore it is necessary to examine their communicative function in detail.
The talk presents the results of an empirical study based on one month’s
headlines of >The Guardian<.
I shall argue that only few headlines are actually directives, whereas
many others are merely reporting directive utterances. A third group uses
quotes as a reference to a cultural frame.
Closely connected with the communicative function are Goffman’s
notions of participation framework and footing. In some instances, the
headline specifies the source or the addressee – hardly ever both (“experts
say” or “bankers [are] told”.) In others, this has to be inferred by the
readers themselves. My interest in these roles – speaker and addressee – is
more general, however. How are they distributed in a political context? Is it
politicians speaking or journalists? Are the addressees the readers or
political opponents? Or would it be more suitable to use terms like
individual, group and collective we as fillers for these roles?
Keywords: Headline, imperative, directive, speaker, hearer.
Bibliographic references
Bell, Alan: 1991. The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.
Davies. Eirlys: 1986. The English Imperative. London: Croom Helm.
Mårdh, Ingrid: 1980. Headlinese. Lund: Gleerup.
Stance Adverbs in Political Discourse: Devices for Delineating
Speakers’ Positions in Argumentation
Alina Ganea (Dunarea de Jos University of Galati, Romania)
[email protected]
Communication involves stance-taking, i. e. speakers’ taking up positions
vis-a-vis the expressive, referential, interactional and social implications of
their speech. Stance-taking is heterogeneous in point of linguistic
expression, ranging from lexical to grammatical and prosodic choices.
Focussing specifically on stance adverbs, the present study analyses their
role in delineating speaker’s positioning in argumentative discourse.
Drawing on Du Bois’s (2007) concept of stance triangle which sets stance
in a dialogical perspective determined by three elements (the stance-taker,
the object of the stance, and the addressee of the stance), stance adverbs
can be classified according to the element they focus on, namely the stancetaker (honestly, truly speaking, unfortunately), the object of the stance
(briefly, strictly speaking, reportedly etc.) or the relationship between the
speaker and the addresse (confidentially, with all due respect). This
research conducts an investigation on the way the first two categories of
adverbs are used in order to express the speaker’s position with respect to
the truthfulness of points of view advanced in argumentation. Our
assumption is that speaker’s position to the propositional content
truthfulness is meant to create rhetoric effects translated in increased
persuasion efficiency of points of view advanced in political discourse.
Keywords: stance, adverbs, speaker’s position, persuasion, political
discourse.
Selective Bibliography
Biber, D., & E. Finegan (1988). Adverbial stance types in English.
Discourse Processes, 11, 1-34.
Du Bois, J. W. (2007). The stance triangle. In Robert Englebretson (ed.)
Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Tseronis, Assimakis (2009). Qualifying Standpoints. Stance Adverbs as a
Presentational Device for Managing the Burden of Proof. Utrecht:
LOT.
Metaphors and War Normalizing Discourse: The Israeli Case
Dalia Gavriely-Nuri (Hadassah College Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University,
Israel)
[email protected]
This study dwells on one powerful metaphorical mechanism engaged in by
Israeli political leaders: war-normalizing metaphors, a mechanism for
framing war as part of human nature and normal life.
War and peace discourses function as effective mechanisms for
sustaining relations of control within a national entity. The identification of
political biases in these discourses opens a window to latent processes by
which powerful groups attempt to influence public opinion and promote
their agendas, in this case an aggressive political agenda .
The contribution of this lecture is dual. First, it looks at the role of
the discourse as either facilitating or obstructing achievement of a culture
of peace or the converse – a culture of violence. Second, it demonstrates
how deconstruction of metaphors can be an efficient tool for exposing
latent ideologies and social beliefs.
Keywords: war discourse, metaphor, Israel
Bibliography
Beer, A. Francis and De Landtsheer, Christ’l. 2004. "Metaphors, politics,
and world politics". In Metaphorical World Politics, ed. A. F. Beer,
and C. De Landtsheer. East Lansing: Michigan State University
Press.
Musolff, A. 2008. "What can Critical Metaphor Analysis Add to the
Understanding of Racist Ideology? Recent Studies of Hitler'
s AntiSemitic Metaphors". Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis
across Disciplines 2 2 1-10. http://cadaad.org/ejouranl.
Language use in politics and the semantics/pragmatics interface
Heiko Girnth (University of Marburg)
[email protected]
One of the main characteristics of language use in politics is persuasiveness.
Persuasiveness is a phenomenon occuring at all linguistic levels, especially
at the semantic level (for example words and frames) and the pragmatic
level (for example speech acts and implicatures). In this paper I will show
that persuasiveness is also a phenomenon of the semantics/pragmatics
interface and depends on the adequate interaction between both levels. This
approach is the starting point for an analysis model which allows a
description of the interaction between semantics and pragmatics, especially
between the complex speech act of argumentation and its semantic fillers
like key words or metaphors. With the help of a corpus analysis (for
example political video-podcasts, TV-speeches and interviews) I will
demonstrate to what extent persuasiveness is a phenomenon of the
semantics/pragmatics interface. Finally, the results lead to an assessment of
how political linguistics should ideally deal with semantic and pragmatic
questions.
References
Girnth, Heiko (2006): Americanizing the Election Campaign: The Rapid
Response-Module as a New Political Text-Type. In: Muhr, Rudolf
(ed.): Innovation und Kontinuität in Sprache und Kommunikation
verschiedener Sprachkulturen. Innovation and Continuity in Language
and Communication of Different Language Cultures. Wien u. a.: Lang,
S. 171-184. [zusammen mit Sascha Michel]
Klein, Josef (2009): Rhetorisch-stilistische Eigenschaften der Sprache der
Politik. In: Fix, Ulla/ Gardt, Andreas/ Knape, Joachim (eds.): Rhetorik
und Stilistik. Ein internationales Handbuch historischer und
systematischer Forschung. Rhetoric and Stylistics. An International
Handbook of Historical and Systematic Research. Berlin/ New York:
Mouton de Gruyter, 2112-2131.
Face-Threatening Questions in Italian Political Interviews: A CrossCultural Study
Augusto Gnisci (Second University of Naples, Italy)
Angiola Di Conza (Second University of Naples, Italy)
Geremia Napolitano (Second University of Naples, Italy)
Gianni Taffuri (Second University of Naples, Italy)
Alfonsina Vigliotti (Second University of Naples, Italy)
[email protected]
In a study on British political interviews, Bull and colleagues (1996)
identified 19 categories of face-threatening questions (FTQs). This study
aims to test the applicability of FTQ category system to the Italian political
interviews, in order to detect (a) if all the 19 FTQ categories identified by
Bull et al. are applicable to Italian interviews, and (b) if any additional
category is required.
Three experts analysed 8h 49m of video or audio recorded interviews,
broadcast during the 2008 Italian General Election campaign keeping in
mind the above-stated aims The results show that all the 19 FTQ categories
developed in the United Kingdom were applicable to Italian political
interviews and 11 new categories of face-threat had to be introduced,
readily incorporable into Bull et al.’s coding system. Some new categories
seemed specific to the Italian context, others proved more general and
applicable to other political cultures, including the United Kingdom’s.
Tested for observer reliability, both the original 19 FTQ categories and the
additional categories provided an excellent level of agreement (k=.96).
Keywords: Face Threatening questions, FTQ category system, 2008 Italian
General Election, Category System Validation, Political Interview
References
Bavelas, J. B., Black, A., Bryson, L., Mullett, J. (1988). Political
equivocation: A situational explanation. Journal of Language and
Social Psychology, 7, 137–145.
Bull, P., Elliott, J., Palmer, D., & Walker, L. (1996). Why politicians are
three-faced: The face model of political interviews. British Journal of
Social Psychology, 35, 267-284.
Dialogue between citizens and politicians impossible? Civil society
crisis in Poland and attitudes towards politicians
Adam Grabowski (University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, Poland)
[email protected]
The unsettlingly high percentage of young and well-educated Poles
choosing not to participate in democratic procedures can be named as the
basic symptom of a serious civil society crisis (Czesnik, 2007). In search
for the antecedents of the crisis, analysts point primarily to the faulty
functioning of the state main institutions (Czesnik, op. cit). Social
psychology suggests a different approach to studying the antecedents: It
may be more important how politicians are perceived and evaluated than
what the citizens’ opinion about the state institutions is. Thus, the present
studies examined young people’s attitudes towards politicians – members
of three parties representing the main political forces in Poland: PiS (Law
and Justice), SLD (Democratic Left Union), and PO (Citizens’ Platform).
The results consistently demonstrate that Polish politicians, even those
representing PO who evoked the respondents’ most positive reactions as
compared to those from the other two parties, are not too highly-evaluated,
particularly because their morality is assessed as low (cf. Wojciszke, 2005).
The personal, usually far from being positive, attitudes towards politicians
then might be the main reason why so many Poles choose not to participate
in the social-political life (Fazio, 1990).
Keywords: attitude, civil society crisis, evaluation, morality, politicians
References
Czesnik M. (2007), Partycypacja wyborcza w Polsce. Perspektywa
porównawcza [Participation in democratic procedures in Poland.
Comparative perspective], Scholar, Warszawa.
Fazio R.H. (1990), Multiple processes by which attitudes guide behaviour:
The MODE model as an integrative framework, „Advances in
Experimental Social Psychology”, nr 23, p. 75–109.
Wojciszke B. (2005), Affective concomitants of information on morality
and competence, „European Psychologist”, nr 1, p. 60–70.
Coherence in confrontational and non-confrontational political
interviews
Luisa Granato (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina)
[email protected]
This presentation focuses on the strategies and resources utilized by the
participants in political interviews to render their interactions coherent in two
classes of argumentative fragments: those which show agreement between the
interactants and those which show disagreement. The empirical evidence is
drawn form a corpus of interviews broadcast on radio and television programmes
in Argentina The interactions were first approached from the perspective of the
Action Game model for the analysis of dialogue (Weigand 2000, 2001, 2008),
which attributes great importance to the diferent cognitive capacities of the
individual minds of the participants, capable of implicating and inferencing
processes which, together with the text, contribute to meaning making in a
speech situation. The study was complemented with the application of notions
taken from the Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988;
Taboada, 2004) that acknowledges the existence of nuclus and satellite units as
components of texts, and the Dialogue Macrogame theory (Mann1988) which
offers resources for the fragmentation of spoken discourses into their constituive
parts. Results obtained helped to devise an analytical construct capable of
accounting for coherence in the type of interactions examined.
Keywords: political interviews, coherence, action game, rhetorical structure
theory, dialogical macrogame.
References
Mann, W. (1988) Dialogue Games: Conventions of Human Interaction.
Argumentation 2, 511--532.
Mann, W and S. Thompson. (1988) “Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a
functioal theory of text organization”. Text, 8 (3), 243-281.
Taboada,
M.
(2004)
Building
Coherence
and
Cohesion.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Weigand, E. (1999b) “Rhetoric and argumentation in a dialogue perspective”
Weigand E. (2000) “The Dialogic Action Game”. Dialogue Analysis VII.
Working with Dialogue. Selected papers from the 7th IADA conference,
Birmingham 1999 ed. Bt Malcolm Coulthard et. Al. 1-18. Tübingen:
Niemeyer.
Weigand E. (2001) “Games of power”. In Weigand, E. and M. Dascal (eds.),
Negociation and Power in Dialogic Interaction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
Benjamins.
Weigand, E. (2008) . “Rhetoric in the mixed game”. In Weigand, E. (ed.)
Dialogue and Rhetoric. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Linguistic Postulate: An Anthropological Approach to Critical
Discourse Analysis
Chun Jimmy Huang (University of Florida, USA)
[email protected]
While widely applicable, Critical Discourse Analysis has yet been able to
effectively address two issues: (1) the dialogue between the top-down
discourse of the “symbolic elites” (Van Dijk, 2006) and the bottom-up
discourse of the ordinary individuals, and (2) that between the Western
political model and the non-Western.
In this paper, I introduce linguistic postulate, which is “a theme or
motif that can be found in almost all the sentences of a language, a feature
that is used repeatedly by the language to organize the universe” (Hardman,
1996:25). Instead of focusing on the linguistic apparatuses used by the
symbolic elites, this anthropological approach looks for the common traits
in everyone’s speech. Furthermore, because it does not take for granted the
political concepts expressed in European languages, the exploration of a
non-Western discourse in its own logic becomes possible.
I then take Taiwan as an example and examine its discourse of
national identity. Through studying the Mandarin postulates of ONEness,
Seniority, Comparative Ranking, and Centricm, and comparing the
nationalistic discourse of the politicians with the identity narratives of
ordinary individuals, I show how the top-down and the bottom-up mutually
influence each other and how national identity is thus negotiated.
Keywords: anthropology, critical discourse analysis, Mandarin, national
identity, Taiwan
References
Hardman, M. J. (1996) The sexist circuits of English. The Humanist
March/April, 25-32.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2006) Discourse and manipulation. Discourse and Society
17 (3), 359-383.
Politische Sprachspiele
Franz Hundsnurscher (Tecklenburg, Germany)
[email protected]
Bei sprachpragmatischer Betrachtungsweise stellt sich der Problembereich
„Sprache der Politik“ als ein Verbund von verschiedenartigen
Sprachspielen auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen dar im wesentlichen unter
Beteiligung von drei Interaktantengruppen: Politikern, Journalisten und
Öffentlichkeit. Bei den Politikern herrscht die größte Vielfalt an
kommunikativen Handlungsformen; es geht im Zusammenhang von
Machterwerb, Machterhalt und Machtausübung um Auseinandersetzungen
zu Sachproblemen mit politisch Gleichgesinnten und Gegnern und um
Imagewerbung gegenüber der Öffentlichkeit. Politiker in ihren jeweiligen
Wirkungskreisen machen Politik und haben diese gegenüber den Wählern
zu verantworten; Journalisten berichten über die Politik und besprechen sie;
ihr sprachliches Handeln steht also unter völlig anderen Bedingungen und
Zielsetzungen als das der Politiker. Die Öffentlichkeit ist in ihren
kommunikativen Handlungsmöglichkeiten erheblich eingeschränkt, so dass
sich den Medien hier ein substitutives Funktionsfeld eröffnet, und die
Politiker sind andererseits auf Vermittlungstätigkeiten der Medien zur
Öffentlichkeit hin angewiesen.
Für die Linguistik könnte die Orientierung an einem solchen
sprachpragmatischen Rahmen dienlich sein, die spezifischen Formen des
politischen Sprachgebrauchs besser zu beschreiben und zu erklären.
Changing strategies and tactics in the parliamentary debate
Marioara Ion (University of Bucharest, Romania)
[email protected]
In this paper, we shall examine the way the participants’ communicative
competence is being actualized in the parliamentary debate, in their attempt
to convince the audience about a certain future action. Their divergent
objectives make them use different communicative strategies and
techniques, based on argumentation, persuasion and manipulation. We shall
investigate, in particular, some of the strategies and tactics used by the
participants during a Romanian parliamentary debate about the removal
from the agenda of the activity report of the Romanian Society of
Television and account for budget implementation in 2008.
Our goal is to find out how the changing process works, how
strategic the appeal of argumentation and persuasion is, whether its
purposes are defensive or aggressive, whether these approaches are
emotional (ethos /pathos) or rather logical (logos). We shalll focus our
analysis on the construction and negociation of the participants'identities,
emphasising different tactics, such as: rhetorical questions, positive selfpresentation, intertextuality (quotations, allusion etc.), humour and others.
Some aspects of the perspectivation in the Romanian parliamentary
discourse
Liliana Ionescu-Ruxandoiu (University of Bucharest, Romania)
[email protected]
The paper examines several perspectivation techniques based on a
particular staging of distinct voices: quotation, rhetorical questions and
irony. These techniques involve a split of the speaker’s voice, which
creates a space for the competition of diverging positions.
They play a specific function in the parliamentary discourse,
connected mainly with its most important constitutive features: its
confrontational and its persuasive nature. The strategic management of the
voices enables the speaker to set his / her perspective on a certain topic, as
well as to react to the others’ perspectives. At the same time, this strategy
makes persuasive actions more efficient, as it exploits indirection, in
different ways, and protects the speaker’s face.
All these aspects will be illustrated with examples from the debates
in the Romanian Parliament. The analytical framework combines elements
from different sources: M. Bakhtin’s dialogism (the concept of
heteroglossy), E. Goffman’s dramaturgic theory of human interaction (the
concept of staging), as well as the more recent theories of perspectivation
Keywords: perspectivation, quotation, rhetorical question, irony,
indirection.
References:
Emerson, C./ M. Holquist (eds.) (1994): Mikhail M. Bakhtin: Speech
genres and other late essays, Austin, University of Texas Press.
Goffman, E. (1959): The presentation of self in everyday life, Garden
City/New York, Doubleday & Co.
Graumann, C.F./ W. Kallmeyer (eds.) (2002): Perspective and
perspectivation in discourse, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John
Benjamins.
Denotational Boundary Disputes in Political Dialogue
Olaf Jäkel (University of Flensburg, Germany)
[email protected]
The analysis of denotational incongruencies by means of comparative
investigations of structural field patterns has been introduced recently (see
Jäkel 2002, 2006). Here I mean to suggest that this method of analysis can
also be put to use in the investigation of certain kinds of contested concepts
(Lakoff 1993), namely cases in which the field patterns themselves are
under dispute. Such '
boundary disputes'occuring between different interest
groups, parties, or ideologies, are most likely to be found in political
dialogue.
The example to be discussed will be the contested concept of life,
which has recently come under serious dispute in the political discourse of
Western countries. My investigation (see Jäkel 2010) focuses on the
entrance boundary of life, with linguistic material taken from the political
discourse on embryonic stem cell research going on in both English
(United States) and German (Germany) in 2001/02. It will be shown how
contested issues like these can be analysed as '
boundary disputes'over the
denotations of some crucial lexical items, in which the diction used by
opposed parties or interest groups gives voice to alternative cognitive
models.
Keywords: denotational incongruencies, contested concepts, life, stem cell
research, cognitive models
Jäkel, Olaf (2002) "'
Morning, Noon and Night'
: Denotational
Incongruencies between English and German", in: Cornelia ZelinskyWibbelt (ed.) Text Transfer: Metonymy and Metaphor, Translation
and Expert-Lay Communication. Berlin/New York: Mouton de
Gruyter, 163-182.
Jäkel, Olaf (2006) "'
Defining the Definition of Marriage'
: Competing
Cultural Models in Intercultural Comparison". L.A.U.D., Series A,
Paper No. 688, Essen University.
Jäkel, Olaf (2010) "Questions of Life and Death: Denotational Boundary
Disputes", in: Hans-Jörg Schmid & Susanne Handl (eds.) Cognitive
Foundations of Linguistic Usage Patterns. Berlin/New York: Walter
de Gruyter, 33-61.
Recontextualizing media genres:
Political news and videos in online newspapers
Marjut Johansson (University of Turku, Finland)
[email protected]
Some traditional genres of printed press and broadcast television, such as news
articles and interviews, are also basic genres of disseminating political
information in digital newspapers. While online newspapers may resemble their
printed versions—in some cases even reproducing the traditional print layout—
there is a difference in the way they transform genres. A news article may
originate from a traditional newspaper, but it can be a hypertext; a news
interviews, or news video may come from a variety of sources or from an
independent news agency. When they are recontextualized from one media
context into Internet, they are often combined together. I propose to study the
mixing of political news and videos in digital newspapers. When organized
sequentially —one embedded into another, one after the other, presented side by
side, or linked to each other — the boundaries of genres are blurred with
multimodality adding to the process of hybridization and resulting in a novel
type of communicative action. In my analysis, I use data collected mainly from
French and Finnish national online newspapers.
Keywords: Internet genres, interview, news article, computer-mediated
communication
References
Giltrow, J. & D. Stein (eds.) 2009. Genres in the Internet. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Rouquette, S. 2009. L’analyse des sites internet. Bruxelles: De Boeck.
‘A matter of seconds’ versus ‘50 shots’: diverging perspectives on an
NYPD shooting incident
Michelle Knight (University of Groningen & Ketchum Pleon,
Amstelveen, The Netherlands)
[email protected]
The fatal police shooting of Sean Bell, a 23-year-old unarmed AfricanAmerican who had just left a New York night club on the night of his
bachelor party on 25 November 2006, led to an intense and protracted
public debate on the functioning of the implicated officers and the police
at large. This study investigates the diverging perceptions held and
conveyed by stakeholders taking part in this debate, including those
critical of the police, those defending the police and the Police
Department itself, in relevant New York Times articles from 25
November 2006 to 8 October 2008 and the appraisal of these perceptions
during 11 personal interviews held with key stakeholders, including the
NYPD’s head of communications, the prosecutor in the Sean Bell case,
and the director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
The analysis of these data provides a multifaceted picture of the
dynamics of this debate. The various stakeholders’ perceptions and
portrayals are shown to reflect diverging interpretive framings that lead to
an ‘us-versus-them’ positioning in which a personalized ‘us’ is pitted
against a depersonalized ‘them’, ultimately causing both impasse and
intensification in debate.
Keywords: NYPD, police violence, minority communications, diverging
perceptions, dynamics of debate
References
Ross, Jeffrey Ian. Making News of Police Violence: A Comparative Study
of Toronto and New York City. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000.
Roy, Beth. 41 Shots ... and Counting: What Amadou Diallo's Story
Teaches Us about Policing, Race, and Justice. Syracuse Studies on
Peace and Conflict Resolution. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 2009.
Multi-dimensional approach to the analysis of power within broadcast
interviews in British and Russian cultures
Svetlana Kucherenko (Loughborough University, UK)
[email protected]
The questions I am addressing in my research is how power can be analysed in
talk-in-action.
I use the theories by Richard Watts, Thomas Wartenberg, Anthony Giddens,
Joanna Thornborrow, Miriam Locher to argue in my research that previous
empirical studies of power in communication are mono-dimensional. I am applying
the term “mono-dimensional” to mean that:
a) Traditionally, a study of power is based on a single theory of power.
b) The underlying concept of power is then stipulated as the only one appropriate.
c) The findings of a particular research are regarded as final and appropriate for
most contexts.
I suggest a multi-dimensional approach to the analysis of power in communication
in which I integrate various conceptualisations of power.
Key-words: CDA, discursive power, broadcast talk, cross-cultural analysis
References
Locher, M. 2004. Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreement in Oral
Communication. Walter de Gruyter
Thornborrow, J. 2002. Power Talk: Language and Interaction in Institutional
Discourse. London: Longman.
Wartenberg, Th. 1990. The Forms of Power: From Domination to Transformation,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
The effect of irony in political call-in radio programs in Israel
Zohar Livnat (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel)
[email protected]
Although Call-in radio programs are part of the institutional discourse and
consequently, are likely to involve an unequal power ratio (Hutchby 1996),
conversations with callers on public radio in Israel are defined as a twosided disagreement interaction (Dori-Hacohen 2008): They involve both a
high degree of cooperation and a high degree of disagreement. The
confrontational nature of the discourse is the program’s declared aim and is
considered something that the host is required to generate.
In the conversations that were reviewed for the present study, most
of the ironic utterances were made by the host. The host often echoes the
words of the caller, on occasion attributing to him implicit stereotypical
views. The goal is to heighten the confrontational nature of the discourse
by reinforcing or highlighting contrasts. However, irony that is directed
towards a third party generates agreement and solidarity between the host
and caller, which the host uses to bolster the position of the caller, thereby
further amplifying the criticism directed towards the third party. In both
cases, the irony enhances the adversarial and confrontational nature of the
discourse and the contrast between the different positions expressed in the
public sphere.
Keywords: irony, radio, call-in programs, confrontational style
References
Dori-Hacohen, G. (2008). Citizens talk about public affairs: The
description of the political phone-in programs on Israeli public radio.
PhD. Thesis, University of Haifa.
Hutchby, I. (1996). Confrontation Talk: Arguments, Asymmetries, and
Power on Talk Radio. N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
“The Election Campaign is over.” – Is the Election Campaign over?:
Critical Discourse Analysis and Cross-Cultural Comparison of British
and German Election Night Speeches
Thorsten Malkmus (University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany)
[email protected]
The aim of this paper is to analyse and to compare discursive strategies of
British and German election night speeches. Two important questions to be
answered in this paper are: How far do politicians use polarizing strategies
that are typical of election campaign speeches in election night speeches?
How far can culturally-specific preferenes be identified?
To answer these questions, this paper deals with Blair’s winner
speech after the British General Elections in 1997 and Schröder’s winner
speech after the German “Bundestagswahlen” in 1998.
In the tradition of van Dijk’s approach to Critical Discourse
Analysis, the investigation focuses on the interplay of the following
linguistic macro- and micro-phenomena:
speech acts
pronouns
metaphors
evaluative expressions
rhetorical formats/applause
Each of these linguistic parameters is continuously examined in
quantitative and qualitative terms with regard to the four corners
WE/THEY - GOOD/BAD of van Dijk’s “ideological square”.
The analysis demonstrates that the vast majority of Blair’s and
Schröder’s utterances refer to WE-GOOD-aspects. Yet, Blair uses many
more implicit negative representations of the political opponent than
Schröder does. In contrast to Blair, Schröder stands in the German
rhetorical tradition of a more balanced and less confrontative self- and
other-presentation.
Bibliographical references:
Lauerbach, Gerda. 2001. Fernsehdiskurse. Nationale Wahlnachtsendungen
im interkulturellen Vergleich und die US Post Election 2000 als
globales Medienereignis.
http://web.uni-frankfurt.de/zenaf/projekte/TVdiscourses/antrag.pdf.
Lauerbach, Gerda & Anita Fetzer. 2007. ”Political Discourse in the Media.
Cross-Cultural Perspectives.” In: Fetzer, Anita & Gerda Lauerbach,
Hgg. Political Discourse in the Media. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 3-28.
van Dijk, Teun. 2009. Society and Discourse. How Social Contexts
Influence Text and Talk. Cambridge: CUP
Romanian political talk-show – the ”drunkenness of words” in the 21st
century
Margareta Manu Magda (Institutul de Lingvistica "I. Iordan – Al. Rosetti"
al Academiei Romane, Bucuresti, Romania)
[email protected]
The paper aims to highlight some cultural-specific aspects of the current
political talk-show in Romania.
Research begins with the general conclusion that political talk-show,
a televised debate, at the Romanian television stations, takes the form of
polemics, based on ”playing with words” directed by a moderator, having
as its objective a show usually incomplete in its argument.
Specifically, the paper will refer to some elements of Romanian
ideality, symbolic place of discourse in talk-show ( items related to the
socio- cultural context, in which these programs are running ) aimed at :
intelocutiv space features of verbal initiatives; - the traits of polemic space
consisting of agreement and opposition between participants; - specificity
of the argumentativ space of persuasion strategies.
The theoretical work is the discourse analysis (DA)(French essence).
The illustrative material is extracted from the transcripts of broadcasts,
talk-show type, presented by Romanian television station Realitatea TV.
Keywords: talk-show, polemics, Romanian ideality, persuasion strategies,
discourse analysis (DA)
Charaudeau, P. / Maingueneau, D., 2002, Dictionnaire d’Analyse du
Discours, Paris, Seuil.
Ilie, C., 2001, “Semi-institutional discourse: The case of talk show”,
Journal of Pragmatics, 33: 209-254.
Manu Magda, M. 2007, La communication dans les médias – un nouveau
code du comportement linguistique poli? in Ionescu Rux ndoiu, L.
(ed.), Cooperation and Conflict in Ingroup and Intergroup
Communication, Editura Universit ii Bucure ti: 327-339.
Political Discourse in national parliaments of English-speaking regions:
a cultural and linguistic analysis
Thomas Medynska (University of Würzburg, Germany)
[email protected]
In democratic systems of government the ministers who together administer the
executive branch of government are answerable to the parliament for their
actions. There are several parliamentary mechanisms for achieving ministerial
accountability, asking questions for oral answer being one of them and the
subject of this doctoral dissertation, the research of which beginning in
November of 2009.
The goal of this paper is to examine at least the following questions of
• how political discourse occurs within the framework of this strictly regulated
interlocutory form of question time
• and which commonalities and differences persist between the various cultural
regions involved.
For this purpose three specific parliamentary versions of question time, namely
the “Prime Minister’s Questions” of Great Britain as well as the “Questions for
Oral Answer” of New Zealand and Australia respectively are examined.
A speech corpus of 15 hours is used per parliament and being scrutinised via
audio files and with the help of the official Hansard transcripts. The essential
theoretical categories chosen upon consultation with the doctoral adviser as yet
include
“quotation”,
“deixis”,
“imagery”
and
“question-response
interdependence”.
Keywords: parliamentary debate, ministerial questioning, cultural variation,
political rhetoric, direct dialogic interaction
Chilton, P.: Analysing political discourse. Routledge (2008): London.
Franklin, M. / Norton P.: Parliamentary questions. Clarendon Press (1993):
Oxford.
Wilson, J.: Politically speaking: the pragmatic analysis of political language.
Basil Blackwell (1990): Cambridge.
Positioning the Opponent during Electoral Campaigns
Verena Minow (University of Bochum, Germany)
[email protected]
During electoral campaigns third order positioning is crucial. One needs to
position oneself as being electable and the most suitable candidate. At the
same time, one needs to position one’s opponents – who sometimes even
belong to the same political party – at the bottom of the scale of
electability. Not all of the positioning that takes place during the run-up to
an election is deliberate (Harré & Langenhove 1991): in television debates
forced positioning of others occurs fairly often while in speeches at
national conventions, for instance, deliberate positioning of others is more
likely. In my presentation I want to focus on the question of how politicians
position their opponents during electoral campaigns in different situations
as well as how the positioning differs when the opponents are present (e.g.
during a television debate) or absent. In addition, I would like to briefly
address the question whether the means of other positioning differ when the
opponent being positioned belongs to the same political camp.
Keywords: electoral campaigns, third order positioning, political
opponent, television debate, electability
Reference
Harré, Rom & Luk van Langenhove. 1991. Varieties of positioning.
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 21(4): 393-407.
Strategic Manoeuvring with Accusations of Inconsistency in Prime
Minister's Question Time
Dima Mohammed (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
[email protected]
Responding to criticism with an accusation of inconsistency is a common
argumentative practice in Prime Minister’s Question Time in the British
House of Commons. Especially when responding to the questions of
Members of Parliament from the Opposition, which imply points of view
that are critical of a certain policy, action or plan of the Government, it is
not uncommon for the Prime Minister to point out that the Opposition’s
current criticism is inconsistent with another position that the Opposition
assumes. In this paper, I analyse such responses of the Prime Minister as a
particular way of confrontational strategic manoeuvring (van Eemeren &
Houtlosser 2003, 2007) that occurs in the argumentative activity type (van
Eemeren & Houtlosser, 2005) of Question Time. The analysis is intended
to shed light on the strategic function of the responses, by unravelling the
interplay between argumentative and institutional considerations that shape
the argumentative practice in the parliamentary session.
Keywords: Accusation of inconsistency, argumentative activity type,
confrontational strategic manoeuvring, definition of the disagreement,
Prime Minister’s Question Time.
References
Eemeren, F. H. van, & Houtlosser, P. (2003). The development of the
pragma-dialectical approach to argumentation. Argumentation, 17(4),
387-403.
Eemeren, F. H. van, & Houtlosser, P. (2005). Theoretical construction and
argumentative reality: An analytic model of critical discussion and
conventionalised types of argumentative activity. In D. Hitchcock
(Ed.), The Uses of Argument: Proceedings of a Conference at
McMaster University (pp. 75-84). Windsor: Ontario Society for the
Study of Argumentation.
Eemeren, F. H. van, & Houtlosser, P. (2007). Seizing the occasion.
Parameters for analysing ways of strategic manoeuvring. In F. H. van
Eemeren, B. J. Garssen, J. A. Blair & Ch. A. Willard (Eds.),
Proceedings of the 6th Conference of the International Society for the
Study of Argumentation (pp. 375–380). Amsterdam: Sic Sat.
Discourse Analysis Challenge in Political Sciences
Oksana Morgoon (Faculty of Applied Political Science of the Higher
School Economics, Moscow, Russia)
[email protected]
The analysis of complex phenomenon of discourse, its structure, and
features explains its potential usage as a means of interaction within
public sphere. Moreover, discourse analysis furthers the investigation of
articulated political processes, actors, events in modern mediatized
society. N. Phillips, T.B. Lawrence, and C. Hardy argue that ‘discourse
analysis provides a coherent framework for institutionalization process’
researching’. They develop a discursive model that highlights the
relationships among texts, discourse, institutions, and action [7: 635].
Evidently, discursive territories define and represent the framework of
political system constituted by interplays between different actors and
institutions. So discourse analysis is inherent in contemporary social
sciences paradigm.
Simultaneously, ‘narrative texts are packed with sociological
information, and a great deal of our empirical evidence is in narrative
form’ [3: 517]. We can say the same statement about political texts and
their investigation. But if discourse analysis is broadly exercised in
political studies? This assumption is contradicted in total articles of
specialized reviews and separate issues. As the appeal to discourse
analysis is strictly constrained in political studies. Therefore it faces such
bias as the dominance of positivist research tradition and quantitative
methods, the criticism of interpretative findings, some methodological
obstacles, and reasoned demand for practical value.
In our study we aim to determine the key directions of discourse
analysis usage in political studies, and its empirical advantages and
deficits as compared with mainstream research tradition on politics. The
analysis of methodological underpinnings is pointed to establish the
scope of proper means of political actions’ investigation.
Keywords: discourse analysis, institutionalization, mediatized (political)
discourse, methodology, political studies.
References
Chilton, P., Schäffner, Chr. (eds.) Politics as Text and Talk. Analytic
approaches to political discourse. // Philadelphia, PA, USA: John
Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002. - 256 pp.
Fairclough, N. Analyzing Discourse. Textual Analysis for Social
Research. – London; New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group,
2003. – 270 pp.
Franzosi, R. Narrative Analysis-Or Why (And How) Sociologists Should
be Interested in Narrative. // Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 24,
(1998), pp. 517-554.
Hindle, T., Checkland, P., Mumford, M., Worthington, D. Developing a
Methodology for Multidisciplinary Action Research. // The Journal
of the Operational Research Society, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Apr., 1995),
pp. 453-464.
Howarth, D., Torfing, J. (eds.) Discourse Theory and European Politics.
Identity, Policy and Governance. // New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005. – 364 pp.
Newman, S. The Place of Power in Political Discourse. // International
Political Science Review, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Apr., 2004), pp. 139-157.
Phillips, N., Lawrence, T.B., Hardy, C. Discourse and Institutions. // The
Academy of Management Review, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Oct., 2004), pp.
635-652.
Titscher, St., Meyer, M., Wodak, R., Vetter, E. Methods of Text and
Discourse Analysis. // London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage
Publications, 2000. – 356 pp.
Ulrich, W. Beyond Methodology Choice: Critical Systems Thinking as
Critically Systemic Discourse. // The Journal of the Operational
Research Society, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Apr., 2003), pp. 325-342.
White, L.G. Policy Analysis as Discourse. // Journal of Policy Analysis
and Management, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Summer, 1994), pp. 506-525.
Metaphor in Political Dialogue
Andreas Musolff (Durham University, UK)
[email protected]
Metaphor and other figurative uses of language play a central role in
political discourse and its dialogic manifestations on account of its
semantic, pragmatic and textual “added value” effects. They provide an
opportunity to introduce new thematic and evaluative aspects and at the
same time increase the textual coherence of dialogue contributions. One
of the oldest examples of metaphor use in political dialogue is the socalled fable of the belly, which tells the story of a dispute between the
seemingly “lazy” stomach and the more “active” body members over the
right to receive food.
At the political target level, the dispute can be understood as an
argument about socio-economic power. The fable has been traced back to
Aesopian traditions; its arguably most famous rendition can be found in
Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, where it is embedded in a debate between the
senator Menenius and rebellious citizens. This “frame” and the “internal”
dispute within the fable inform each other and establish a multi-layered
“inter-textual” and “inter-dialogic” pattern. Shakespeare’s text has
become a model for further versions and allusions to the fable in political
discourses up to the present day. I shall propose that it is this multilayered metaphoric structure that has made the fable of the belly dialogue
such a successful model of creative political communication.
Comparisons with other uses of the fable show that the metaphor, for its
part, loses its much of its potential semantic creativity if it is
“streamlined” to fit into a monological text-structure. Dialogue and
metaphor thus appear to be mutually dependent on each other if they are
to function as a basis for semantic innovation.
References
Harris, Jonathan Gil (1998). Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic.
Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kövecses, Zoltán (2009). Metaphor, Culture and Discourse: the pressure
of coherence. In: Andreas Musolff and Jörg Zinken (eds.). Metaphor
and Discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 11-24.
Marie de France (1993). The Fable of a Man, his Belly, and his Limbs.
In: Carl Nederman and Kate Langdon Forhan (eds.). Readings in
Medieval Political Theory 1100-1400. Indianapolis/Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing, 24-25.
Musolff, Andreas (2006). Metaphor Scenarios in Public Discourse.
Metaphor and Symbol, 21(1), 23-38.
Musolff, Andreas (2010). Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust. New
York, London: Routledge.
Patterson, Annabel M. (1991). Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and
Political History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Pizan, Christine de (1994). The Book of the Body Politic. Edited and
translated by Kate Langdon Forhan. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Schoenfeldt Michael (1997). Fables of the belly in early modern Europe.
In: David Hillmann and Carla Mazzio (eds.). The body in parts:
fantasies of corporeality in early modern Europe. New York,
London: Routledge, 243-262.
Shakespeare, William (1976). Coriolanus. Ed. Philip Brockbank.
London: Methuen & Co.
Shakespeare, William (1983). The Complete Works of William
Shakespeare. Edited, with a glossary by W. J. Craig, London:
Pordes.
Zinken, Jörg (2007). Discourse metaphors: The link between figurative
language and habitual analogies. Cognitive Linguistics, 18(3), 443464.
Polish political landscape at the period of accession to the EU:
Lexicostatistical approach
Adam Pawłowski (Wrocław University, Poland)
[email protected]
Communication can be regarded as the core of a political system.
Politicians – actors on the political stage – create in the minds of their
audience mediatised constructs of what is referred to in the political
vocabulary as left vs. right wing oriented, centric, nationalistic, liberal,
conservative, religious, republican etc. These constructs, however, can be
also defined as particular modes of political dialogue, with a specific
vocabulary and phraseology, stable collocations, inherent axiology, and
formulaic structures repeated at various contexts (Esser, Pfetsch 2004;
Kaid, Holtz-Bacha 2008).
In our study lexicostatistical approach will be applied to the
description and analysis of Polish political scene at the period directly
following the EU accession (2004-2007). A corpus including representative
samples of political language used by the parties present at the Polish
parliament will be analysed by means of statistical tools such as frequency
counts, Short Semantic Representation and Multidimensional Scaling
(Lebart, Salem 1994; Pawłowski 2008). The main data sources for our
study were: parliamentary discourse, party documents, interviews, and
politicians’ blogs. Texts will be analysed with regard to the following
variables: religion, ideology, nationalism, values, economy, EU integration.
Keywords: political communication, Poland, lexicostatistics
Bibliography
Esser Frank, Pfetsch Barbara (eds.) (2004), Comparing political
communication: theories, cases, and challenges. Cambridge, New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Kaid Lynda Lee, Holtz-Bacha Christina (eds.) (2008), Encyclopedia of
political Communication. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.
Pawłowski Adam (2008), A corpus Approach to the Polish Communist
Propaganda Language from the Stalinist Period (1953). The method
of Short Semantic Representation (SSR). In: Barbara LewandowskaTomaszczyk (ed.), Corpus Linguistics, Computer Tools, and
Applications – State of the Art. PALC 2007. Frankfurt am Main etc.:
Peter Lang, 519–532.
Lebart Ludovic, Salem André (1994), Statistique textuelle. Paris: Dunod.
The strategic use of argumentation from example in plenary legislative
debates in the European parliament
H. José Plug (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
[email protected]
Argumentation from example may particularly be found in plenary
legislative debates in which the need for legislation is under discussion. In
these debates, it is, in principle, necessary to argue that there is a legal or
social problem of sufficient seriousness as to require (new) legislation. In
order to defend or criticise the (sub)standpoint that there is a problem that
provides enough reason to take action in the form of a proposal for
legislation, argumentation from example may be advanced.
Although the use of examples may be effective in achieving
rhetorical gains, when used argumentatively they may be easily criticised
for constituting the fallacy of a hasty generalization. Members of the
European Parliament may be expected to try to avoid this criticism and
therefore manoeuvre strategically when they put forward argumentation
from example.
In her contribution Plug concentrates on how argumentation from
example may be used to manoeuvre strategically in plenary legislative
debates in the European parliament. She discusses the most important
characteristics of this particular type of argumentative discourse and
demonstrates how these characteristics may affect strategic manoeuvring
when staging argumentation from example.
Keywords: argumentation from example, argumentative activity type,
hasty generalization, plenary legislative debate
References
Eemeren, F.H. van (2010). Strategic manoeuvering in argumentative
discourse. Extending the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ilie, C. (2003). Discourse and metadiscourse in parliamentary debates.
Journal of language and Politics 2, 1, 71-92.
Zarefsky, D. (2008). Strategic maneuvring in political argumentation.
Argumentation, vol. 22, no. 3, 317-330.
The Communication of Certainty and Uncertainty in Italian Political
Discourses
Ilaria Riccioni (University of Macerata, Italy)
Ramona Bongelli (University of Macerata, Italy)
Andrzej Zuczkowski (University of Macerata, Italy)
[email protected]
The general subject of our study is the epistemic indicators i.e. those linguistic
(lexical and morphosyntactic) markers which reveal the epistemic attitude a
speaker has in relation to the piece of information s/he is communicating. In
particular, our interest is focused on the certainty and uncertainty markers in a
corpus of Italian political discourses and dialogues.
The analysis of the individual discourses allows us to point out two
different main communication styles: the first communicates certainty and uses
mostly declarative sentences in the past, present and future indicative without
lexical epistemic markers; the second one communicates uncertainty and uses
mostly lexical epistemic markers and morphosyntactic ones as conditional and
subjunctive moods. The analysis of the political conversations in our corpus
shows that they often have a pronounced conflictual nature which manifests
itself mostly through the opposition of different and contrasting epistemic
certainties.
Keywords: evidentiality, epistemicity, certainty-uncertainty, political
discourses, dialogical conflict
References
Bongelli R. & Zuczkowski A. (submitted). Perceptual and Cognitive Linguistic
Indicators (PaCLIs) and the Theory of the Known, the Unknown, the
Believed (KUB Theory).
Fetzer A. & Lauerbach G. (Eds.) (2007). Political discourse in the media: crosscultural perspectives. Amsterdam-Philadelphia, John Benjamin Publishing.
The Discursive Practice of Addressing in the Romanian Parliament
R zvan S ftoiu (University of Ploie ti, Romania)
Stanca M da (Transilvania University of Bra ov, Romania)
[email protected]
In the parliamentary environment, the discursive practice of addressing is
subject to socio-cultural constraints. On the one hand, one may identify the
social significance of the institution where MPs work; on the other hand,
the MPs of a country share a set of cultural expectations, which are closely
related to social and communicative activities.
From browsing the websites of some Parliaments (New Zealand,
United Kingdom), we have noticed that there is a particular ritual of
addressing to the members of this institution, but this aspect is not recorded
in writing on the website of the Chamber of Deputies of the Romanian
Parliament.
In this paper, we will analyse forms of address as they are used by
members of the Romanian Parliament and identify a recurrent pattern of
addressing in the interventions during parliamentary sessions. We will
mainly focus on forms of address and will suggest a typology of these
forms of address for an institutional discursive practice, i.e. the
parliamentary discourse. We will also analyse if there are any constraints in
the Romanian Parliament or, on the contrary, if Romanian MPs
demonstrate flexibility in choosing forms of address.
Keywords: forms of address, Romanian parliament, ritual, practice, pattern
Bibliography
Bidu-Vr nceanu A., C l ra u C., Ionescu-Rux ndoiu L., Manca M., Pan Dindelegan G. (2001), Dic ionar de tiin e ale limbii, Nemira,
Bucure ti.
Brown P., Gilman (1960), „The pronouns of power and solidarity”, în
Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.) Style in language, Cambridge, MA,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, p. 253-276.
Dumitrescu D. (2003), „The speech act of «wishing» in Spanish and
Romanian”, lucrare prezentat la Congresul Interna ional al
Lingvi tilor, edi ia a XVII-a, Praga.
Fairclough, Norman, 2005, „Neo-liberalism – A discourse-analytical
perspective”, în Conference on British and American Studies, Bra ov,
pp. 1-17.
Ilie C. (2001), „Unparliamentary language: Insults as cognitive forms of
confrontation”, în R. Dirven, R. Frank and C. Ilie (eds.) Language
and Ideology, Vol. II: Descriptive Cognitive Approaches,
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, p. 235-263.
Ilie C. (2003), „Discourse and metadiscourse in parliamentary debates”, în
Journal of Language and Politics 1 (2), p. 269-291.
Ilie C. (2005), „Politeness in Sweden: Parliamentary forms of address”, în
L. Hickey and M. Stewart (eds.) Politeness in Europe, Clevedon,
Multilingual Matters, p. 174-188.
Ilie C. (2006), „Parliamentary Discourses”, în Keith Brown (ed.)
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 2nd edition, vol. 9, Oxford,
Elsevier, p. 188-197.
Pietreanu M. (1984), Salutul în limba român , Bucure ti, Editura tiin ific
i Enciclopedic .
Pomerantz A., Mandelbaum J. (2005), „Conversation Analytic Approaches
to the Relevance and Uses of Relationship Categories in Interaction”,
în Kristine L. Fitch, Robert E. Sanders (eds.) Handbook of Language
and Social Interaction, Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum, p. 149-171.
Psathas, G. (1999), „Studying the organization in action: Membership
categorization and interaction analysis”, Human Studies, 22 (2-4), p.
139-162.
Sacks, H. (1992), Lectures on conversation, în G. Jefferson (ed.), Oxford,
Blackwell.
Searle J. R. (1975), Speech Acts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Debate climate and argumentation in political interviews and debates
Margareth Sandvik (Oslo University College, Norway)
[email protected]
The aim of this paper is twofold: to describe the debate climate and the
argumentation in some Norwegian election campaigns in the period 19912009, and to present a methodology for analysing political interviews, by
integrating conversation analysis and argumentation analysis.
The paper will discuss whether the debate climate has consequences
for how the argumentation is conducted; whether standpoints are defended
and to what extent. Evaluation of political argumentation rests upon a
reconstruction, and how this reconstruction is to be carried out, takes
advantages from the integration of conversation analysis and argumentation
analysis (Sandvik 1997, Lauerbach 2007). On the basis of the pragmadialectical argumentation theory (van Eemeren and Grootendorst 1995), an
alternative procedure for reconstruction is suggested.
Keywords: argumentation, conversation analysis, debate climate,
evaluation, election campaigns
References
Lauerbach, Gerda. 2007. Argumentation in political talk show interviews.
Journal of Pragmatics 39, s. 1388-1419
Sandvik, Margareth. 1997. Reconstructing Interactive Argumentative
Discourse. Argumentation 11, 1997, The Netherlands: Kluwer
Academic Publishers
van Eemeren, Frans og Rob Grootendorst. 1992. Argumentation,
Communication, and Fallacies. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Multimodality and performance in political and commemorative
discourse: The BBC transmission of Britain's first Holocaust Memorial
Day on January 27, 2001
Christoph Sauer (University of Groningen, The Netherlands)
[email protected]
The Holocaust Memorial Day is an example of a ‘media event’ (Dayan &
Katz), of which the participants’, politicians’ and other public figures’
discourse and socio-cultural practices (Fairclough 1995) are analysed: of
commemorating, celebrating, referring to political morality and learning
from the past (‘Lessons for the future’, official brochure). This is, however,
not enough if we concentrate on what TV viewers were able to hear and
see: the multimodal combination of different semiotic resources and the
predominant features of political and commemorative performances. The
‘audience design’ (Allan Bell) of the ceremony, then, comes to the fore if
we do not restrict ourselves to the words and phrases uttered, but if we
integrate pictures, sound and other symbolic means that contribute to the
performative quality of the ongoing communication. The political context
of the official commemoration intervenes into the public memory
constellation that is used in order to establish a common knowledge about
genocides and the holocaust. How it is done and how it is ‘designed’, is in
the focus of this contribution. It will be shown that TV audiences are
treated as ‘overhearers’ and ‘overviewers’ (according to Goffman’s/Clark’s
‘participation framework’) overhearing and overviewing political
commemorative performances, participating in a political (as well as
commemorative) dialogue. A transcript of the BBC programme will be the
main source of the analysis.
Keywords: commemoration, multimodal discourse, audience design,
performance
References
Bell, A. (1991). The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.
Clark, H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Dayan, D. and Katz, E. (1992). Media Events. The Live Broadcasting of
History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Fairclough, N. (1995). Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2005). Introducing Social Semiotics. London:
Routledge.
Framing the addressees’ mindsets in political speeches: The dialogical
‘other’ in argumentative monologue
Melani Schröter (University of Reading, UK)
[email protected]
The concept of frame will be used to explain patterns of addressee
orientation in political speeches. It will be argued that the addressees are
present in the monological speech; as traces of the dialogical ‘other’. The
presentation will focus on the way politicians frame the addressees’
mindsets in terms of nearness and completeness (consensus frame) and/or
distance and incompleteness (dissent frame). The occurrence of both the
consensus and dissent frames will be contextualised with respect to the
intentions of the speakers and the functions of the attached means and
strategies will be discussed as constituting speakers’ default perspectives
which they aim to impose on the addressees. The ‘addressee frames’ will
be discussed with regard to expectation (Tannen 1993), relevance (Ziem
2008) and perspectivising (Ensink/Sauer 2003).
References
Ensink, Titus/Sauer, Christoph (eds.) (2003): Framing and Perspectivising
in Discourse. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Tannen, Deborah (ed.) (1993): Framing in Discourse. New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Ziem, Alexander (2008): Frames und sprachliches Wissen. Kognitive
Aspekte der semantischen Kompetenz. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter.
Cognitive Categorization and Prototypicality as Argumentative Strategies:
Presidential Rhetoric in the USA
Christoph Schubert (University of Würzburg)
[email protected]
Cognitive categorization is an indispensable instrument of organizing human
experience. Owing to the obvious appeal of clear-cut categories, they frequently
serve as a strategy of political persuasion, when a simplified and polarized world
view is construed. The success of such rhetoric impressively corroborates the
allure of dichotomies, although they blatantly contradict the actual nature of
cognitive categories, which usually have fuzzy and overlapping boundaries.
Since prototypicality yields a great cognitive effect but demands only little
processing effort, prototypes are likewise convenient in political dialogue, where
speakers must often get their message across to a wide and heterogeneous
audience in a limited space of time. Along these lines, the analysis of numerous
examples of presidential rhetoric produces the prototypical enemy or national
hero that may develop into an emotionally charged stereotype. Therefore, this
paper will adopt a dynamic construal approach, emphasizing that cognitive
categories are contextually negotiated. It aims to show that political dialogue
does not merely reflect existing categorizations but also has the power to shape
and perpetuate them in the minds of the target audience.
Keywords: Categorization, prototype, dichotomy, argumentation, persuasion
References
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories
Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: The U of Chicago P.
Rosch, Eleanor. 2000. "Categorization." In: Jef Verschueren et al., eds.
Handbook of Pragmatics. 1998 Installment. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1-14.
Taylor, John R. 2003. Linguistic Categorization. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Rejection of arguments in the media through grammatical means
Pnina Shukrun-Nagar (Ben-Gurion University, Israel)
[email protected]
Previous studies (e.g. Van Dijk, 2006) have found the media to be biased
when covering the “other”. In the Israeli media the Ultra-Orthodox
(Haredim) are strongly discriminated against (e.g. First & Avraham, 2007).
I will examine a variety of news items presenting Haredi positions
on various issues, and will present grammatical strategies used by the
media to reject their arguments: syntactic structures of negation and
concessive clauses, active verbs, givenness markers, thematic focus,
complex questions, etc. I will show that the Haredi positions are
consistently rejected by the media - explicitly, implicitly, or simply by
ignoring it.
Keywords
Other, Media, Ultra-Orthodox, Argumentation, Grammatical Strategies
References
First, A. & E. Avraham (2007) ‘Multi-Cultural Diversity in TV
Commercial Broadcasting in Israel and Ways To Improve It’. In:
Caspi, D. (ed.), Political Communication in Israel. Jerusalem: Van
Leer Institute & Hakkibutz Hameuchad: 134-161 (Hebrew).
Van Dijk, T.A. (2006) ‘Ideology and Discourse Analysis’. Journal of
Political Ideologies 11: 115-140.
Argumentation strategies of the extreme right: an analysis of Nick
Griffin’s discourse in BBC ‘Question Time’
Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen (University of Ghent, Belgium)
[email protected]
[email protected]
Equivocation has been shown to characterize the discourse of leading
politicians of mainstream British parties in broadcast interviews (see
especially Bull 2003, 2008). At least 35 different equivocation strategies
have been identified (Bull, 2003), which Bull (e.g., 2008) has argued can
be understood in terms principally of facework and face management.
Simon-Vandenbergen (2008) compared these techniques with those used in
debates by speakers of the extreme right-wing party in Flanders, Vlaams
Belang (‘Flemish Interest’, VB). She found that while they utilized
comparable equivocation strategies, they also made use of ad hominem
attacks (unlike the British politicians), and proportionately more attacks on
the question. O’Driscoll and Simon-Vandenbergen (2009) explored to what
extent such features could be found in the discourse of the British extreme
rightwing party, the British National Party (BNP). Although they found ad
hominem attacks to be notably absent, there were clear parallels with the
VB in the presentation of the BNP as the ‘victim’ of the establishment.
The election of BNP leader Nick Griffin as a Member of the
European Parliament and his subsequent appearance on the prime time
BBC television show ‘Question Time’ provided an unprecedented
opportunity for further analysis of far right-wing British political discourse.
Interestingly, the questions put to both Griffin and the VB speakers were
very similar. This facilitated a direct comparison of Griffin’s responses
with those of VB speakers, which will be presented in this paper, together
with a detailed analysis of Griffin’s argumentation strategies. In addition,
audience responses are analyzed, in order to assess the effectiveness of
Griffin’s responses to questions.
References
Bull, Peter. 2003. The Microanalysis of Political Communication. Claptrap
and Ambiguity. London: Routledge.
Bull, Peter. 2008. “Slipperiness, evasion, and ambiguity”: equivocation and
facework in noncommittal political discourse. Journal of Language
and Social Psychology 27 (4): 333-344.
O’Driscoll, Jim and Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen. 2009.
“Personalisation in extremist political discourse: a recurrent feature
across contexts and cultures?” Paper given at the IADA conference,
Barcelona, September 2009.
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie. 2008. “Those are only slogans”. A
linguistic analysis of argumentation in debates with extremist political
speakers. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 27 (4): 345358.
Fair play, foul play: metacommunicative games in political dialogue
(based on British, German and Russian parliamentary debates and
political interviews)
Sivenkova, Maria (Minsk State Linguistic University, Belarus)
[email protected]
The monitoring of compliance with various communicative rules can be
regarded as a strategic task in political dialogue, since catching an
opponent red-handed gives the speaker a number of benefits. As a
linguistic result of a successful monitoring, the sequential structure of
question-answer sequences becomes more complicated due to the
appearance of negative evaluative turns in which the breach of rule(s) is
exposed.
When “going meta” (Simons 1994), politicians seem to be playing
several games (Berne 1996): (1) “Now I’ve Got You” (the politician directs
the opponent an evaluative remark); (2) “Ain’t It Awful?” (the politician
complains about the opponents’ drawbacks to a third party); (3) “Happy to
Help” (the authority figure or politician exposes the victim in the form of a
well-intentioned advice). Some cross-cultural differences of such turns will
be discussed.
Keywords: political dialogue, parliamentary question-answer sessions,
political interviews, evaluative turns, metacommunicative games.
References
Berne, Eric. 1996. Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of
Transactional Analysis. New York: Ballantine Books.
Simons, Herbert W. 1994. “Going meta”: Definition and political
applications. Quarterly Journal of Speech, Volume 80 (4): 468-481.
Intersubjectivity in ObamaTalk: Creating dialogue in political
speeches
Sara W. Smith (California State University, Long Beach, USA)
[email protected]
Two speeches by Barack Obama are analyzed in terms of their use of
intersubjective discourse strategies, that Is, ones that rely on the speaker’s
assumptions about the mental states of listeners.
Examples are presented of both explicit and implicit strategies, from
his speeches on race (facing a potentially hostile general audience), and on
healthcare (exhorting reluctant congressmen). Explicit strategies utilized
metadiscourse in presenting presumed inner dialogue--past, present, and
future. Implicit strategies relied on presumptions about the audience’s
beliefs and cognitive processes. These included the use of inclusive
pronouns (Le 2004), definite reference (Givon 2005), negation (Verhagen
2005), metaphor, and humor.
Implicit devices are interesting in that they use intuitive rather than
formal reasoning systems. They require that listeners generate a given
claim (e.g., that race has been an issue in the campaign, that healthcare is
good for you) and thus make listeners complicit in the desired conclusion,
while utilizing the quick intuitive system on which much everyday
reasoning depends (Rydell & McConnell 2006).
I argue that this display of attention to the audience’s mental states
creates a sense of dialogue between speaker and audience, even when the
audience is passive, and that intersubjectivity thus helps define dlalogue.
Keywords: political speeches, intersubjecitivity, Barack Obama, definite
reference and negation, intuitive reasoning
Selected References:
Givon, T. 2005. Context as Other Minds. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Rydell, Robert J. & McConnell, Allen R. 2006. Understanding implicit and
explicit attitude change: A systems of reasoning analysis. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 91(5), 995-1008.
Verhagen, Arie. 2005. Constructions of Intersubjectivity. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
Politics – A game of words?
Edda Weigand (University of Münster, Germany)
[email protected]
‘Doing politics’ has more and more become a media event comprising
different types of games such as speeches, parliamentary debates,
interviews, round table discussions. The basic question however relates to
what ‘doing politics’ actually means. Political interests not only refer to
positioning oneself in a favourite light in order to get votes. Basically
political goals aim to create a certain way of life for the community
according to the programme of a political party. Various communicative
means, explicit and implicit, are used; strategies of persuasion, power and
of shaping identities pervade. The paper will focus on the integration and
interaction of different components – purposes and interests,
communicative means and strategies – in the mixed games of politics such
as the Opposition game, the persuasive game and the power game.
Keywords: political interests, communicative means, strategies,
persuasion, power
References: Weigand, Edda. 2009. Language as Dialogue (Sebastian Feller,
ed.). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Political Irony
Elda Weizman (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)
[email protected]
This presentation argues for the important role played by irony in the
positioning of politicians in media dialogue. Expanding on previous studies
(Weizman 2008, in press), and based on the analysis of irony in the written
press and televised interviews, it will be suggested that irony implicitly
enlarges the participation framework, so as to include ironists and targets
who are not necessarily to be identified with ratified addressers and
addressees (Goffman 1981). Strategies used to position politicians (Harré
& Langenhove 1999) as antagonistic in varying degrees of indirectness will
be delineated, and the dialogic aspects of this adversative positioning in
news interviews will be analysed. Drawing on a fine-grained examination
of politicians’ responses to the direct and indirect speakers’ meanings of
interviewers’ ironic moves, it will be argued that the manipulation of
degree of indirectness affects the politicians’ reciprocal positioning.
Keywords: dialogue, face, irony, news interviews, positioning
References
Harré, Rom & Luk van Langenhove (Eds.) (1999). Positioning Theory:
Moral Contexts of International Action. Oxford: Blackwell.
Goffman, Erving (1981). Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Weizman, Elda (2008). Positioning in Media Dialogue: Negotiating Roles
in the News Interview. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Weizman, Elda (in press). Conveying indirect reservations through
discursive redundancy. Language Sciences.
Europe in the Ukrainian media texts through the prism of
interpersonal metaphors
Galina Yavorska (National Institute of International Security Problems,
Kiev, Ukraine)
[email protected]
The interpersonal metaphor is one of the most popular in foreign relations
discourse. It probably shapes the structure of political categorisation and
argumentation.
The relations between Ukraine and EU are represented in Ukrainian
media texts in some recurrent interpersonal metaphors. The paper explores
metaphors describing Ukraine - EU relations in the Ukrainian media since
2005 till 2010. The implicit scheme of sexual desire is used to interpret
Ukrainian intention to be the member of EU, esp. the negative EU attitude
towards European perspective for Ukraine is conceptualized as insulting
reluctance in sex.
The analysis of performative verbs in the news such as vymahaty
(‘to urge for’), napoliahaty (‘to insist’), shows that Europe plays a
metaphorical role of a person with higher social position (‘boss’ or
‘teacher’) whereas Ukraine is connected with a ‘subordinate’ or ‘student’.
The last representation has a long tradition in Ukraine since the late 19th
century.
The final example demonstrates the political misunderstanding as a
result of metaphorical collision. It appears that in the context of European
Neighborhood Policy Ukrainian word for neighbor susid designates the
‘alien’ and refers to negative cultural scenarios.
Keywords: political discourse, conceptual metaphor, cognitive semantics,
performative verbs
References
Lakoff, George (2004). Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and
Frame the Debate. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Musolff, Andreas (2004): Metaphor and Political Discourse. Analogical
Reasoning in Debates about Europe, Basingstoke, New York.
Yavorska, Galina & Alexander Bogomolov (2010) Nepevnyi obyekt
bazhannia: Evropa v ukrain’skomu politychnomu dyskursi,
Vydavnychyi Dim Dmytra Burago, Kyiv (Uncertain object of Desire:
Europe in Ukrainian political discourse, in Ukrainian).

Abstracts 31 August - Anglistik und Amerikanistik

Transcrição

Documentos relacionados

Analyze of bgol.us - Check Website Score

abstracts

Analyze of capnhq.gov

Analyze of persian-gaming.ir

Analyze of orbitz.com

Descarregue a versão PDF

Juliano Desiderato Antonio Form and function of

Topic prominence is not a factor of variation between Brazilian and

abstracts - Comunicação e Cultura

CONTENTS - Department of English

Puzzle Out the Semantic Web Search

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER LIBRARY ABILENE

From Monologue to Dialogue? Cohesive

YESTERDAY`S DEFORMITIES - Institutional Repository